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A new study today shows that the expansion of mobile money helped bring hundreds of thousands of Kenyans out poverty, especially those in female-headed households. The study, published in Science, examined how M-PESA, Kenya's text message-based payments system, spread across the country over six...

The new study found that poor rural women in Kenya with access to a mobile phone-based service allowing them to send and receive payments at low cost shifted their occupations from agriculture to business and saved more. The combined effects reduced poverty for hundreds of thousands of households...

IPA Researcher and board member Tavneet Suri of MIT speaks with Vox about her new findings, published in Science. The research, conducted with with Billy Jack and IPA, looked at the how poverty was reduced in Kenya as M-PESA expanded and made mobile money more widely available in the country. Read...

Vox recommended IPA in its roundup "These are the charities where your money will do the most good,” because IPA is a meta-charity, a charity that improves how other charities work.
"If they can turn a dollar of donations into substantially more than a dollar of increased donations to effective...

On December 1st, IPA Colombia launched a partnership with the Bogota Department of Social Integration in order to develop a research agenda in 2017 around early childhood, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, and the elderly. The two organizations signed a Memorandum of Understanding in which they...

NPR's Global Health team Goats and Soda asked readers to vote on what question they wanted answered most, and they chose "Can Microloans Lift Women out of Poverty?" They speak to IPA founder Dean Karlan and a number of IPA-affiliated researchers to answer the question, summarized in our brief Where...

Researchers who conducted randomized controlled studies in several countries began to question the effects of micro lending in raising the economic fortunes of the poor. While the loans increased business starts for those without business to begin with, for those already in business the impact has...

Bloomberg has an in-depth look at IPA's work using behavioral economics to encourage Americans in the cash economy to start saving. It's a frank look at the promise and difficulties of new field research.

Significant evidence so far points to the success of graduation style programs to get people out of poverty. These programs help the poorest “graduate” from destitution into sustainable livelihoods, largely by fostering self-dependence and resilience before disaster hits. In 2015 the Consulting...

Getting a microloan is far easier than getting a bank loan. But in east Africa many people have access to an even easier source of credit. It takes just a few taps on a phone to obtain a short-term loan, which will arrive in a mobile-money account almost immediately. It is an exciting, scary...

They don’t call economics the dismal science for nothing. A study of Ethiopian workers released last week by the US National Bureau of Economics Research found low-wage factories—often known as sweatshops— were dangerous, undesirable and paid even less than self-employment in the informal sector....

The theme of this year’s Global Handwashing Day on October 15, 2016, is “Make Handwashing a Habit!” In places without access to piped water, new products and technologies are needed to make handwashing with soap convenient enough to become a habit. Handwashing with soap is a powerful weapon against...

For the 2.5 billion people who live on less than $2 per day, shocks such as illness, crop failures, livestock deaths, farming-equipment breakdowns and even wedding or funeral expenses can be enough to tip them, their families, or even an entire community below the poverty line. A major challenge...

In the past several decades, manufacturing jobs have fled the developed world for the developing world. Obviously, that’s profoundly reshaped the economies of developing countries like China and Bangladesh. But what does that mean for the ordinary people who are doing the work — often for...

The Financial Inclusion Program at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) invites Expressions of Interest (EOI) from teams of researchers and financial service providers to conduct rigorous research on financial product innovations for low income households in developing countries.
This call for...

New Haven, September 26, 2016 - A new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research today looked at the impacts of taking a factory or industrial farm job on young workers in Ethiopia, and found that these industrial jobs gave unemployed people a steady income, but this came...

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